Tell me your best mnemonic techniques.

Recently I got a promotion that’s taken me from managing a team of <20 salespeople to managing eight such teams, plus their support staff. This comes to about 170 people. I’m determined to be able to instantly match everybody’s face to a name, but I’ve never been good with names. I could require all the salespeople to post their full names in a prominent place on their cubes, but I’d rather not require that change in culture; this is my issue, after all. Any suggestions?

Memory is associative, and the brain stores names in one hemisphere and faces in another. All the traffic to connect the two has to travel across the corpus callosum, which is one explanation as to why it’s so very difficult to put names with faces.

First technique:

  • when you’re introduced to a person, find a connection between their name and their face. Ex: His name is Bruce. Bruce is puce. Imagine Bruce’s face puce with rage. Puce Bruce blew a fuce (fuse). Imagine Bruce, puce with rage, blown fuses in place of his eyes. Include the >spew!< sound a fuse makes when it blows. Downside? You have to be warmed up and ready for some serious mental sprinting to do this successfully with a group of people.

Second technique:

  • create a memory house. Or, in your case, Skald, a memory Borg restoration center or similar. Create a visual-spatial map and assign people to locations with reasons that make sense to you. Ex: Persephone is stored with the vinyl records because she’s always in the groove. Downside: really hard to do on the fly, and I don’t know how well it’ll allow you to link face with name.

No-fail method that you hide from everyone else:
This is what both my mom and I have used as teachers, because 130 different students traipsing through each day took me a minimum of six weeks to get straight, and there would be at least a pair of girls in every damn class, who I couldn’t tell apart. Take a picture of each face and put it in a document with a label, arranged by seating (desks for me, cubes/offices for you). You could do it in an Excel document or Visio or other software. My mom always went for the hardcopy. Downside: you have to come up with a plausible reason to take pics of everyone, and you may not feel comfortable with people knowing you use this. Upside: you can study the damn thing and practice.

I like phouka’s third technique. I work in the administrative office of a school, and I find that if a student’s record includes a picture, I’m far more likely to remember his or her name later.

Your staff might not mind you getting pictures of all of them (maybe even IN their cubes, for even better association) if you just let them know that you need a little help remembering names.

When you first get introduced to someone, use their name a often as possible in the following conversation with them. Then write their name down along with some comments about their appearance.

Interact as much as possible with them and keep using their names often.

Congratulations on the promotion.

Thank you. It does cement my transformation from feckless but idealistic artist to corporate sellout. Except that I refuse to sexually harass my secretary.

I bet she’s disappointed.

It’s 2013. Maybe she can sexually harass you.

I’m not THAT pretty.

It’s 2013 where you are. In Memphis it’s still 2002.

? Watch out for SARS, it’ll be big next year. Bet on the Patriots. Also, you will not believe this, but CATS! will finally close in London!

Congrats on the new position.

You don’t have nameplates on the cubes already? I go into the office so rarely now and so many people move in and out I wouldn’t know who anyone was without a nameplate on a door or cubicle.

If you don’t get all the names down before long, you could use your new authority to require employees to have their name tattooed on their forehead. And I know what people are going to say, but they could just use temporary tattoos in case they change their name in the future.

Now that’s just pure laziness.

Could you forward this to me in the past please?

Also, this is from another thread, but I’ll quote myself regarding the mnemonic:

It does work though, as does the memory palace.

If my admin wishes to be sexually harassed, she may do it to herself, at home, and on her own time.